Edutopia - April/May 2008 - (Page 50)

The GlobalSix Costa Rica By Mary Kadera Clotilde Fonseca Laurie O’Donnell Scotland Positive social change through tech What sort of poetry professor winds up in a Logo class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab? If that professor is Clotilde Fonseca, she is a visionary who very early in her career identi⇒ed technology as a galvanizing force that could help improve the prospects of Costa Rica’s poorest citizens. Early in her tenure at the University of Costa Rica, Fonseca felt a pull toward work in social development. She grew to believe that educational technology is the best possible tool to accomplish that work. “Access to both learning and technology,” she declared in a 2002 interview in Harvard University’s ReVista magazine, is “a fundamental precondition to equitable development and a sustainable democracy.” Today, Fonseca is executive director of the Fundación Omar Dengo (FOD), a private nonpro⇒t organization based in San José, Costa Rica, focused on educational innovation and the social bene⇒ts of new technologies. Along the way, Fonseca participated in the MIT Media Lab in the 1980s, attended Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she earned her master’s degree in public administration in 1992, and worked as executive president of the Costa Rican Social Assistance Institute, which is in charge of the country’s antipoverty programs. Under Fonseca’s leadership, the FOD oversees the Ministry of Education’s National Informatics Education Program, which is responsible for Costa Rica’s education-technology guidelines for grades K–9. The organization also offers a variety of other programs for teachers and students in youth democracy and citizenship education, media literacy, student media production, robotics, constructivism, and workforce education, delivered via the Internet and through conferences and workshops. FOD staff members develop these initiatives working in partnership with local and national education agencies, private companies such as Microsoft and Intel, and international organizations like the World Bank and UNESCO. The programs have reached more than one and a half million Costa Ricans. Fonseca and her colleagues want more for Costa Rica’s children than access to machines and commercial software; instead, they want to use technology to “bridge the gap between school-based learning and civic action,” writes Maya Carlson, a Harvard medical professor who has worked with the FOD. Children are “citizens with a responsibility to ⇒nd solutions and express their views,” adds Carlson, a fact that demands “socially and personally meaningful appropriation of technology.” Creating ties that bind a nation’s schools In his native Scotland, Laurie O’Donnell leads a project that many in the United States might consider a mission impossible. It is Glow, the world’s ⇒rst national schools intranet. Launched last September, the system, according O’Donnell, is “an attempt to provide a level playing ⇒eld” to educators and learners in all thirty-two local educational authorities in Scotland. The Scottish government has invested the equivalent of $80 million in this ambitious program to connect 750,000 learners and 53,000 teachers working in 3,000 schools across the country. Glow provides users with communication and collaboration applications such as videoconferencing and instant messaging, instructional resources like courseware and multimedia archives, and administrative tools that include grade books and assessment software. Half a year since its debut, Glow boasts six-⇒gure registration numbers, thanks in part to support for new users provided in person by more than 600 trained mentors. So far, twenty local authorities have signed on to use Glow, and more are expected to join later this year. O’Donnell, director of Learning & Teaching Scotland, the organization responsible for Glow, says the local authorities’ main concerns “are just as you would expect.” Mostly, he adds, they are worried about funding to support local implementation, the adequacy of local bandwidth, the ability to integrate with existing systems, and the need to muster reliable programs for training and support. O’Donnell and his colleagues alleviated some of these concerns by engaging teachers and advisers from every local authority in a two-year process to draw up the speci⇒cations for the service. The result, he says, is a level of ⇓exibility and responsiveness that delivers “one national intranet with thirty-two implementations.” O’Donnell describes the ups and downs of the Glow roll-out in his blog but his main lesson learned is about the importance of patience and good-faith collaboration: “The time it takes to take people with you is an investment for the future.” Derek Wenmoth Brilliance—from a distance New Zealand When Derek Wenmoth ⇒rst began studying distance education, he believed strongly that it was a way to provide accessible, relevant, and high-quality experiences to learners from all walks of life in all parts of New Zealand. At the time, the concept consisted primarily of correspondence courses. But as he began experimenting with Web-delivered distance learning in the mid-1990s, Wenmoth’s excitement grew along with the opportunities he began to imagine for his students—and for their teachers. “Education is a fundamental human right,” says Wenmoth, a means to “a decent society where everyone contributes in a positive and productive way.” Distance learning, now a much-enriched system to deliver the highest-quality education experiences as broadly as technology will allow, is still his passion. Wenmoth is the director of e-learning at Core Education, a nonpro⇒t group he founded with two colleagues in 2003 that designs and hosts online learning communities for educators and offers professional-development courses, as well as collaborative student projects. Teacher education was Wenmoth’s focus for eleven years prior to launching the organization; as early as 1995, Wenmoth orchestrated large-scale teacher-education programs that combined face-to-face instruction with online communities. Some 24,000 New Zealand teachers have enrolled in the online professional-development program in instructional technology Wenmoth oversees. More than half of the nation’s schools participate, including language-immersion schools for the Maori, who preceded New Zealand’s European settlers by hundreds of years. The program is expanding to re⇓ect the country’s new national curriculum framework and to train teachers and principals in whole-school development and reform strategies. Based on the program’s success, Wenmoth is now working with Malaysia’s Department of Education on a similar effort. His blog embodies his enthusiasm for all things e-learning but also underscores his end goal. In December, Wenmoth wrote, “I began thinking how easy it is to become excited about the fact that Twitter now has a new feature called TwitThis or that Google has added twenty-three language translation bots, but at the end of the day, what are these things really worth to us unless we are able to use them in ways that may profoundly alter the ways in which our students think about the world, their part in it, and the things they might do to help spread a conspiracy of love within it?” 50 EDUTOPIA APRIL/MAY 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Edutopia - April 2008

Edutopia - April 2008 Contents Up Front Feedback Dispatches Sage Advice Ask Ellen Head of the Class Cool Schools Design Reinventing the Big test The Daring Dozen Heart & Soul Pop Quiz: Jack Prelutsky

Edutopia - April 2008

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